Amazon forests and Junglee.com

So whats in a name you ask! Amazon believes there’s so much to it. By the looks of the logo and the sound of the name, it conveys the amazon-ness of the venture and its wasn’t bad after a visit to the site. A check on the history of junglee.com reveals, Amazon as early as 1998 had thought of entering India. Just kidding a reading of this article makes it evident that they had bought out Junglee way back in 1998 when it was a database technology company in Sunnyvale.

Now there is a Indianess to the name Junglee, what could it mean and would you be interested to do the trek in there? Looks like they are working around the law especially the one Mamata Didi didn’t want that of the FDI in retail. A visit to Junglee.com was pretty interesting, they had done a good home work and the design was minimalist and clean white space used to the optimum.

They had my attention, there are enough department – oh departmental stores sort of. They had everything under the sun, not the kind of launch that we normally see when they tell you we are working to get more for you. So I click on the featured departments thinking it would make my work easy.

It does to a great extent and I could use any of the departments to narrow down and make my purchase. As I concentrate there were these two small font sized line “Starting at ” and “Offers from” which gave the least price and how many people are selling…made me thinking if I had entered a aggregator site. I click on one of my favorite books and get an awesome pricing… but wait, there is Indiaplaza but no Flipkart and no Infibeam… we almost had an aggregator to tell us the best pricing on a title.

Now its also a store for some already existing brands, I got to see the featured sellers on this page during my trek at Junglee.com! A lot of names one of the big south based cellphone retailer Universal Mobiles, Snapdeal etc were present. Now this is a killer idea to get even those on ground to go online and you dont have to think about your branded online store and you get much better credibility than that of an auction site read ebay. Only time will tell how it will work out. It will take long for us to identify with this style of ecommerce model.

The question here is how will the customer perceive the product will it be just the price factor, will he look at premium products at all, Indian scenario will sure be the lesser the price the higher the hits. Though these are early days, Amazon by virtue of its brand has a big following and now it will be interesting to watch how the existing players read – Flipkart.com and Infibeam.com slug it out with Junglee.com.

In a way the launch has now stopped the much often repeated “when is Amazon gonna launch” and lo they are here. By being a platform to start with they wanted to play it safe, you know you need to crack the most important ‘Delivery model’ for this place called India. So I thought I should search for Amazon’s own product Kindle, here too it directed me to Amazon.com, India specific site details where they said they have started shipping to India now. If you are ordering over US$ 100, it doesn’t have extra shipping charges.

So it has now come to India officially, and bet interesting times are ahead. One more doubt linger on will they also have Amazon.in in the near future . But I am sure in all this one person is sure to win, the Indian online consumer who will now be spoilt for choice and the best in customer service will win hands down. As of now, Junglee.com will work only for the comparison part of the pricing and holds no repsonsibility for deliveries, a bit disappointed that we cant experience Amazon delivery.

As I was about to log out, I saw this line in small thin font… “We help you discover over 1.2 crore products. You choose where to buy!” They almost got one product for almost 10% of the our population! Now that’s a really ambitious target anyday! Or one for every active internet user which ever way you look at it.

Well about the name Junglee, Indians can easily identify with it for the desi version of Amazon. Our forefathers were living in forests if you go by Darwin, and Amazon would wants you to take a trip except that this is all virtual.